We assess the productivity growth of the English and Italian healthcare systems over the period from 2004 to 2011. The English (NHS) and the Italian (SSN) healthcare systems share many similar features, facilitating comparison: basic founding principles, financing, organization, management, and...

Background: Studies of long-term trends in the healthcare financing mix generally focus on a dichotomous concept discerning public from private funding sources. More detailed analyses of the funding mix tend to be restricted to a small number of cases or do rarely examine time trends. Aim: This...

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' Prescription Drug Consumer Price Index (CPI-Rx) has been the focus of considerable controversy in recent years. The CPI-Rx limits its sampling frame to transactions in retail outpatient outlets, and excludes prescription pharmaceuticals dispensed in hospitals,...

Price and quantity indexes are applied in the analysis of expenditure on physician services in the province of Ontario, Canada, using newly available data files for 1992 and 2004. Price indexes for such services are found to have increased less rapidly than indexes of general inflation and...

Price and quantity indexes are applied in the analysis of expenditure on physician services in the province of Ontario, Canada, using newly available data files for 1992 and 2004. Price indexes for such services are found to have increased less rapidly than indexes of general inflation and...

We construct price indexes for treatment of a specific illness, acute phase major depression, using treatment episodes of care (rather than fixed input bundles) to define quantity. We identify different treatment service bundles that combine varying quantities of prescription drugs, medical...

There is a consensus that statistical agencies should report medical data by disease rather than by service. This study computes price indexes that are necessary to deflate nominal disease expenditures and to decompose their growth into price, treated prevalence and output per patient growth....

Stress tests of financial institutions are becoming more common in the midst of a global recession and unpredictable future economic growth. We believe that apart from banks, stress tests can be conducted on hospitals as well and will have their merit. The proposed methodology for risk...

In this position paper we deal with the conception of heterogeneity as both the force and the result of evolutionary change. We ask, how this heterogeneity can be measured empirically and how we can get a measure which allows to get a broad comparable empirical account especially on several...

This paper presents a nonparametric method for calculating a lower bound on the virtual or reservation price of a new good. This allows the welfare effects of product market innovations to be investigated. We illustrate the technique using consumer panel data.